Many come from cartel-ravaged ‘Hot Country’

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SAN DIEGO — Elizabeth Silva was walking her younger sister to school when two hooded men burst into her house and fired three bullets into her father. When her 14-year-old brother rushed out of his bedroom to see what was happening, he was also shot dead.

The killings in a sun-seared farming region of western Mexico prompted her to board a bus to the US border to seek asylum, a hugely popular escape route in a remote area that has seen some of the country’s worst drug-fueled violence. As gunfire rang in the distance, her family hurried out of the cemetery after burying the bodies and fled the same day.

Asylum requests from Mexico have surged in recent years and, while the US government does not say from where within Mexico, the Associated Press has found that many are arriving at the border from the “Tierra Caliente,” or Hot Country, about 250 miles west of Mexico City. Word has spread there that US authorities are releasing women and children while they await hearings before immigration judges, emboldening others to follow.

The AP counted 44 women and children from the Tierra Caliente released in San Diego from Aug. 26 to Sept. 27, including Silva, 25, her 2-year-old daughter, mother, grandmother, and sister.

Many from the town of Buenavista carry a formal letter from town official Ramon Contreras stating they are victims of persecution.

“The residents of this town are under death threat from a drug cartel. . . . Please provide them the protection they request,” the letter reads.

The Tierra Caliente is so completely ruled by one vicious drug cartel that residents in a half-dozen towns formed self-defense groups earlier this year to try to drive out the gang. Now, they are fleeing in droves, saying their rebellion has made them targets for cartel killings.

“There have been many, many families going to the United States to seek asylum,” said Hipolito Mora, a leader of the patrols in the Ruana neighborhood of Buenavista, a municipality of 42,000.

The Knights Templar cartel, a pseudo-religious gang that takes its name from an ancient monastic order, has set fire to lumber yards, packing plants, and passenger buses in a medieval-like reign of terror. The cartel extorts protection payments from cattlemen, growers, and businesses, prompting the vigilante patrols in February. That drew more attacks from the cartel, which sought to cut off the area’s main economic activity, growing limes.

A Buenavista politician was hacked to death and a Navy vice admiral killed in an ambush. In April, 10 people were killed in a cartel ambush as they returned from a meeting with state officials to ask for help.

The flight from Tierra Caliente comes as asylum requests from throughout Mexico more than quadrupled to 9,206 in 2012 from six years earlier, when the Mexican government launched an offensive against drug cartels. The Department of Homeland Security says an average of 11 Mexicans sought asylum daily at San Diego border crossings from Aug. 9 to late September.